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Tuesday, 2 June 2015

IDS: Ignorance, Agnotology and Gas Lighting?

It is well known that Iain Duncan Smith has a limited
patience for reality.

He has faith in a calamitous policy of Universal Credit,
he believes that unemployment has no structural causes and that the unemployed
can be sanctioned into work. The evidence, at every turn, shows he is wrong
(see Donkey passim). But evidence long since passed being relevant.

I’ve been party to conversations about IDS. I’ve spoken to
high profile anti-poverty campaigners who ally an intimate grasp of his
damaging policies with a surprising forbearance for his desire to be seen as a
sympathetic social reformer. (Incredibly some really do see IDS as a social reformer, see this Spectator piece by
Isabel Hardman).

Other people, while not necessarily ruling out his good
intentions, think him a bungling idiot. Surely this was behind the media’s
wrongly held belief, last year, that he was due to be sacked. In the event neither
reshuffle, nor a subsequent general election left a mark on this most shambolic
of ministers.

This tells us a lot about mainstream journalists and commentators,
but precious little about IDS.

George Osborne, according to right wing commentator, Matthew
D’Ancona, thinks IDS an intellectual lightweight, an observation that, if true, is especially interesting if
added to D’Ancona’s other revelation that IDS was shocked, upon entering
government, at just how jealously the Treasury guards its power over public
spending (how can a politician be unaware of this?).

Still, IDS survives concurrently with a reputation as a
deeply ignorant politician.

And we should pay attention to Slater’s thesis. Because if
we are to stand a chance of fighting the drip of poison aimed against society’s
most vulnerable, then we need to confront the reality that a formally ‘liberal’ or
reason-based politics has long since ceased to operate in this country. We need to confront the fact of a
deliberate campaign of ignorance-inducing propaganda, honed by neoliberalism
during countless skirmishes against practical reason (think climate change
denial, big tobacco, Greece or austerity more generally).

It’s a thesis (unwittingly?) echoed by Adam Curtis, whose last
documentary tackled a similar project of political ignorance, but this time
at the level of culture.

Agnotology is the process of sowing doubt with the aim of
keeping people sufficiently unsure about reality, such that they are dissuaded from
acting to change it. Philip Mirowski in his book ‘Never
Let a Good Crisis Go To Waste’ recounts how this process ran its course in
the run up to 2008 crisis and in its subsequent fallout.

Mirowski painstakingly depicts what sometimes feels like a
conspiracy theory-sized account of how reasonable, rational positions (on
issues as varied as climate change, tax and macro economics) were
systematically undermined with the sole aim of preventing change contra to the
interests of the wealthy.A further
collection of articles on this burgeoning area of academic inquiry is contained
in the book ‘Agnotology: the
making and unmaking of ignorance,’ including research which
uncovered the famous tobacco industry memo declaring ‘Ignorance is our product'.

Students of agnotology say it is qualitatively different from
simple propaganda, in that it’s object is the social and cultural production of ignorance.

I’m often struck by the similarity agnotology bares to the
phenomenon of ‘gas lighting’. Gas lighting is a form of psychological abuse,
diagnosed by feminist thinkers, that convinces its object (usually a female spouse,
but also children) to doubt their memory, perception, reality and, ultimately, their
sanity (the term ‘gas lighting’ is from the 1944 film ‘Gas Light’). Feminists
have noted the way abusive men routinely enact the technique through a
combination of lies, deceit, rumour (and just enough truth) to keep their
victimised partner or family, unsure, unbalanced, emotionally
drained, isolated and thus easier to control. The technique is an acknowledged
favourite of the narcissist and the psychopath, also the torturer (Read this blog for a delicious example of how
a woman
turned the tables on a gas lighting partner, by making him watch the film ‘Gas
Light’. As an aside, the Greek film ‘Dog Tooth,’
while fictional, seems to me to come close to depicting the workaday horror of
a family marked by this kind of abuse.)

In IDS’s favour, I can’t find a single example of him ever having
uttered the word ‘scrounger’. Indeed he
denies ever saying it (George Osborne came close in his infamous‘shirkers versus
skivers’ budget speech). But to chase around looking for a verbatim record
of what IDS or Osborne did or didn’t say is to miss the point entirely, indeed
it is to fall victim to the self-same mind games so beloved of the gas
lighting, agnotological abuser.

Some advice

The best defence against narcissism is to run.

Unfortunately, the poor, the disabled, the young, the sick and the unemployed
cannot just up sticks to Bermuda to spend time with their offshore accounts.

The second best defence is to be prepared to count everything as a lie, to judge these
people by what they do, and allow no mitigation in their endless fork tonguery.
It is a sign of weakness, like blood in the water, to engage a narcissist in a
discussion about reasons. Similarly it is a proper defence mechanism against the crazy-making barbs of politicians to dismiss everything they say, offhand.

Forget about the lies. Fixating on the lie is their trick, a means to an end. Insanity and
anomie lie at the end of any attempt to reason with such people.

Condemning all politicians is no new thing. Indeed from the
comfort of the commentariat it is a position often sneered at. Well, it may be
‘unsophisticated,’ it may be uncouth to them, but what difference should that
make?

We have the right, to treat as lies, every word from the
mouth of IDS and his ilk.